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Quilting has its own fashions and fads.  Crazy quilting comes out of the Victorian excess of velvets and laces, combined with the development of ways to process photos onto fabric.  Dying lace in old tea gives a perfect cameo of resourceful women using up all of their little treasures.

This year, I am revisiting crazy quilting with updated fabrics and available sewing technology.  Our culture is obsessed with images, so I am using images from art history, commercial art, and family photo albums as design elements.  The first ‘sketch’ quilt in the series is ‘Living Large,’ which is a 12 x 12″ quilt.  It uses a cubist painting by Gino Severini, 1912, which added sequins to the composition over 100 years ago [Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin).   Divided and reconfigured with fabric, embroidery, lace, and a handmade buttton, it emerges here as the anchor of an image and font-rich quilt.

Purple Sage 15 x 21"

We are on our way to the Utah Woodturning Symposium.  This little modified bargello-style quilt combines printed cowboy images with the colors of the West.   It is machine-pieced, and outline quilted with machine embroidery stitches.  I embroidered the black feather stitches in memory of my pioneer Grandmother Ambrose.    She sewed, crocheted, and embellished with tatting, but the feather stitch was always her favorite.

We will be staying not far from where she home-steaded in Utah before moving to Eads, Colorado, where my mother was born in 1923.  My mother, by the way, refuses to get ‘Pioneer” Colorado license plates, because she doesn’t want people to think that she is old…